The Other Side of the Wall

by Amy Ephron

  “Have an excellent time,” said Tess. “We’ll be just fine.” But as she said it, Tess realized she had no idea if that was in fact going to be true . . .

  ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ~

  trying to pretend that everything is normal

  Do you think there’s anything on TV?” Tess asked, as she reached for the remote control on the table in the living room of the suite. “I was hoping maybe there’d be an old movie on. I don’t want to watch the news. Maybe there’s a mini-series on, preferably not a crime one, one with a real story,” she said sort of wistfully. “One that Mom might like.” Tess hit the remote control “on” button, but nothing happened.

  “Do you think there’s another remote?” she asked “Max,” quite certain he would know the answer, but he stared at her blankly. Then she remembered, “the person who used to be Max” might not be as attuned to electronics as her brother was. She tried screaming at him, “Max!! Max!!” but he just kept staring at her silently.

  “This dress is very uncomfortable,” she said, quietly, her voice breaking, almost to herself. “I think I’ll go and change before I tackle the television. . . .” It was sort of an excuse because she was close to tears and the last thing she wanted was for “the person who used to be Max” to see her cry. She didn’t know why but she was certain that wasn’t a good idea. Inside her head, she was screaming, “Max?!! Max?!! Are you in there?!”

  Black jeans. That was what she wanted to wear. She hung her dress up carefully but didn’t realize as she slipped it off over her head that the cat’s eye marble dropped out and rolled across the floor.

  She pulled her black jeans out of the bottom drawer and put them on. White t-shirt. She wanted to wear a black t-shirt but that was too dark. Black belt. Plain, no buckle to speak of. Black socks and her sort of tennis shoes, also black, that were a little more like ballet shoes, very light with almost no sole, thin laces, so you could walk carefully, almost on a tightrope if one was around, or if you wanted to, trudge through a field. She didn’t know that both of them would be needed. But she had a feeling it was going to be a long night.

  She had to get Max out of there. Or did she have to get Colin out of there—it was very confusing—without doing any harm to Max. Why? Why had it happened? The boy must want something. That was all she could figure out. Colin must want something. She didn’t want to believe that he was just evil.

  Time was doing that funny thing again. Where a minute felt longer than it was and then a half hour could go by almost in an instant. Time, in Tess’s experience, was variable.

  She’d never felt so alone before.

  ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO ~

  strange breaths

  It was cold, so cold. It felt like a brisk wind was blowing through the room. Outside in the garden, icicles had formed on the branches of the tree again and they were sparkling in the moonlight. The weather had been so changeable. And it looked as if it might change again.

  “The person who used to be Max” had a button-down sweater on, cashmere, for sure. Tess wondered where that was from. But maybe boys borrowed clothes, too. That made sense. Except he was shivering. He was so cold. His lips were practically blue against his pale opaque white skin.

  Max wasn’t that pale. He’d never been that pale.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak to her, but only a puff of air came out. The way one breathes outside on a cold day when your breath is hotter than the air. Except it wasn’t quite like an exhaled breath, more like a waft of white smoke that curled up strangely in the air. And then another. And then a funny sound inside his chest, as if he was trying to breathe.

  Max sometimes got asthma. But Tess didn’t think that this was that.

  No one had built a fire in their room that day. Tess didn’t see any logs by the hearth or she would have attempted it. She could time his breaths by the wispy white smoke in the air. He seemed to be breathing slowly, so slowly.

  Was he trying to tell her something?

  There was so much time between each breath.

  It felt as if time itself had slowed even more. Tess couldn’t tell if there were twenty seconds or longer between each of the breaths, or if you could even call it a breath. There were just wisps of bright white smoke curling up in the air.

  Tess realized she had been holding her breath. People did that sometimes when they were frightened. At least that’s what her dad said. And then he’d given them advice, “Breathe. Always remember to breathe. Especially if something’s making you anxious.”

  Tess let her breath out, then breathed in deeply, then let it out again and realized there was no visible sign of her breath, no white wisps of smoke when she breathed. Just his. And his breaths were coming at strange irregular intervals.

  As she walked towards him, Tess felt as if she was moving in slow motion, too, as if there was resistance in the air and she was moving through a haze or a fog. Maybe she could reach Max. Maybe if she did something completely Max-like, she could get him to come back.

  “Let’s go up to the library,” she said. “Please, Max.” Maybe, if she spoke to Max, she could bring him back. “I’ll play chess with you, Max. I don’t mind if you win. . . .”

  The boy nodded. Tess picked up the key. And put it in her front jeans pocket. “I’ll race you,” she said.

  Tess knew there’d be a real fire burning in the fireplace in the library and “Max” or “the person who used to be Max” was so cold. She grabbed the blanket off his cot and went to race him. She was very relieved when he ran after her, so relieved, she shut the hotel room door and forgot to lock it.

  ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ~

  strange exit

  The library wasn’t any warmer. No one had built a fire there either. It looked different somehow. There were definitely more books on the shelves, maybe someone had restocked them, and there was a pair of slippers on the carpet in front of the comfortable wingchair upholstered with beige silk fabric dotted with pale pink flowers. Everything seemed to have been fluffed up, an expression her mom would use, the cushions placed just so on the sofa, the mahogany coffee table shiny, with a slight hint of the scent of lemon oil in the room, as if all of the wood had been polished, too, including the bannister that led down to the lobby.

  It was cold. So cold. Maybe the heat was out. That must be it. Tess wanted to tell someone at the desk, but she hadn’t seen anyone in the lobby when they walked through it. Strange.

  The chess board was set up. “Sit there,” she said. “You always like to play black and give me the white advantage as you should. You’re so much better at chess than I am.”

  The boy nodded at her. That was how she was going to think of him now. Just as “the boy.” She tried to convince herself that Max was in there somewhere, if she could only reach him. Max. Max!! She and Max used to think they had almost psychic communication. But the boy just sat there in the chair where she directed him to sit down.

  He was so cold. Tess wrapped the blanket around him. And rubbed his hands, the way their mom would do in New York in the winter sometimes when they’d come home from school. Tess wished she’d brought a blanket for herself. She saw a small, soft gray blanket folded over the arm of the sofa and wrapped that around herself, like a shawl, and sat down across from him.

  He was so pale.

  She moved her Queen’s pawn up. That was the safest move. At least that was what Max had told her.

  He picked up his left knight as if he was going to move it but instead he seemed to almost freeze. It reminded her of what Colin had done when Max had played table hockey with him. He sat there frozen in mid-air.

  “Max!! Max!!” She couldn’t help it. She screamed at him. “Max! Max!” But it was as if he didn’t see her.

  And then his eyes blinked. She hadn’t realized it, but it was almost as if they hadn’t blinked before. But it was as if he had been frozen somehow in time. He was sti
ll holding the knight tightly in his hand. He got up from the table. He turned away from her. And began to walk away. And Tess watched as he walked right—she had to be imagining it—as she watched him walk straight through the wall . . . and simply disappear.

  “Maaaxxx!!”

  It was still freezing in the room. But there wasn’t a visible crack in the wall. Nothing. Just her. In the empty library with one white Queen’s pawn moved up one spot and, as if in punctuation, the other side of the board set up perfectly except that one of the black knights was missing.

  “Maaxxx!!”

  She ran down the small flight of stairs to the lobby. There was no one there. At least, that what she thought at first. But then she saw the gentleman with the bowler hat, the one who owned Princess, sitting in an armchair in the corner. She ran over to him to beg him to help her. “Please!” she said. He was staring straight ahead as if he didn’t even see her and couldn’t hear her pleas. She sat down in the chair next to him.

  “Please. Please!” she said. “Won’t you help. I think my brother’s . . .” But before she could finish the sentence, she saw the gentleman’s face begin to crack and tiny pieces start to break away, first his cheek and then part of his nose as if he was made of plaster. The wall behind him started to crack as well. And all the papers neatly stacked behind the bell desk flew from their spots and scattered across the room as if a wind was blowing, a lampshade flew sideways.

  As if by instinct, Tess reached into her front jeans pocket for the marble but realized it wasn’t there. She hadn’t put it in her jeans when she’d changed her clothes. Not that she was sure that it would help.

  The massive chandelier with the hanging prisms in the lobby began to shake as if it could fall from the ceiling. She looked over at the armchair where the gentleman had been sitting but all that was there was a cloud of dust.

  Tess ran from the room towards The Garden Room, only to find that the door was open.

  “Maaxx!! Maaxx!!” She called out, hoping he might be there.

  But the only thing that answered her was the wind.

  ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ~

  the cat’s eye marble

  Tess ran to the closet in her bedroom, pulled her denim dress off the hanger. But the marble wasn’t there—the cat’s eye marble wasn’t in either of the dress pockets. Maybe she’d put it down. That had to be it. Maybe she’d put it on the bedside table, before she took the dress off. She checked both of them. It wasn’t there. She ran back into the living room of the suite in the hope it might be on one of the side tables of the couch. But it wasn’t there either. She knelt on the rug and pulled the edge of the couch up to look under it. But it wasn’t there either. She had to find it.

  She realized it wasn’t Max she had to find, it was Colin. Max couldn’t walk through a wall. And the only thing she had that linked her to Colin was the cat’s eye marble that she believed belonged to him and that she thought had powers of its own. She had to get to the other side of the wall. . . .

  Then she remembered looking for the remote control. It was so cold in the room. . . . But she was so upset, she couldn’t even feel the cold. She ran over to the table where the TV was and the remotes. But the cat’s eye marble wasn’t there either.

  At least the walls seemed solid in The Garden Room. That was something anyway. The chandelier wasn’t swinging. She walked back into the bedroom. Had she gone into the bathroom and she hadn’t remembered? Her mom often left her rings on the sink when she washed her hands. No, there was nothing there either.

  She walked over to the bed, uncertain what to do. She thought about lying down, pretending none of it had happened and she would wake up soon. “Maaxx! Maaxx!” But nothing answered her but the wind.

  And then she saw something jostle the skirt of the elaborately made bed. And then tap it again. She wasn’t imagining it. And then a paw, an orange paw with white stripes. And then the cat’s eye marble came flying across the floor directly to her, followed by Ginger whose paw it was.

  Tess leaned down and picked it up immediately and closed her right hand around it. It was warm, not as warm as it usually was. But it was warm. And she bent down to pet the cat and say, “thank you.” She deposited the marble safely into her front jeans pocket and without even thinking about what danger might lie ahead, ran back through the lobby to head up the stairs again to the library. It was something their Dad always said. “If you get lost, try to get back to where you started, if you can.” He always added that part, “if you can.”

  ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE ~

  trying to get back to where she started

  She ran through the wreck of the lobby. She stared straight ahead as she ran, so as not to be distracted or frightened by any of the chaos or destruction. She had her right hand in her jeans pocket, holding tightly onto the marble, as if it might somehow protect her.

  She ran up the short flight of stairs into the library, only to find that the old-fashioned wooden door that she’d never noticed before was closed. She tried the doorknob, but the door appeared to be locked.

  She had to get inside. There wasn’t any other choice. She had to get back into the library. She tried the knob again, it turned but the door wouldn’t budge. It was locked up tight.

  Then she remembered, she had the key to The Garden Room in in her left pocket, not that that would work. . . . But it was an elaborate key, with the blown glass prism on top that had the red swirls inside, sort of like the cat’s eye marble in her other pocket. Maybe it was a master key. Maybe.

  Tess took it out of her pocket. She shut her eyes and made a wish and when she opened them, the key was sparkling. Brilliantly sparkling. And then emitting sparks. And, almost as if it was magnetically attracted, drawn to the keyhole where it affixed itself and turned almost by itself. Tess turned the doorknob and was able to open the door to the library.

  But it wasn’t a library. It was a boy’s bedroom—at least she thought it was a boy’s. There was a dark plaid bedspread displayed on the old-fashioned brass bed, with matching pillow cases. The chairs were covered in brown corduroy fabric, made slightly more comfortable by navy-blue throw pillows. There was a standing hockey game table in the back of the room that looked a lot like the hockey table Max and Colin had played on in Colin’s room only two nights before, although it looked slightly newer. In fact, the room looked a lot like Colin’s room. She put the key back in her pocket.

  She was holding the marble with her other hand. She let go of it and took that hand out of her pocket, too. But the room stayed the same.

  She was in a room that looked like an old-fashioned boy’s room. No library. No chess-table. No bar. She looked down the stairs to see if she might have taken a wrong turn but no, she hadn’t.

  She remembered Adele’s words again, “There’s something on the other side of the wall.”

  In the corner, there was a desk, an old-fashioned desk, modest, not too elaborate, as if it was a desk for a kid. There was a paperweight on it, which Tess realized instantly had the same orange blown glass center as the cat’s eye marble and similar to the key, as if they were all part of a set or had been made by the same glass blower.

  The desk was very tidy but there was a note on it. Tess wondered if that was an ethical dilemma—if you find a note on somebody’s desk are you allowed to read it? Was it sort of like looking at somebody’s email without their permission? And then she realized it wasn’t. Because she didn’t know where she was, and if there was a clue there somehow, she had to read it.

  The first thing that struck her was the date:

  December, 1926

  Three Days before Christmas

  And then she recognized the stationery. It said at the very top, centered and engraved in black ink:

  SANBORN HOUSE

  And nothing else. No identifying address underneath. Just Sanborn House. It was a note from Colin’s mother
, handwritten, in an old-fashioned ink-pen-perfect curlicue way.

  Dear Colin . . .

  And then his mother went on to tell him in the note that she and his father were going out that night to a party and asked if he would help take care of his sister Lizzie. Not much more than that.

  Except that it was December, 1926. That was the date. Three Days before Christmas.

  Tess reasoned, hotels like to hold onto history and sometimes display historical items. But she touched the paper and it was thin, exquisitely thin, but not the least bit fragile. There’s a way paper feels when it’s new that is very different from the way paper feels when it’s old or even been sitting around for a few years. And this had been sitting around for . . . Tess hated to think how long. Or had it? It didn’t feel brittle at all. It felt new. She put the letter down and picked up the glass paperweight with the orange swirls inside from the desk. It, too, was warm when she touched it, the way the marble had been.

  She looked around the room and now it was different even than the room she’d walked into. At least the way she’d walked in was gone. There was no longer a staircase down to the lobby.

  In fact, it didn’t seem as if there were any doors, at all. There was a window and outside Tess could see, even though it was nighttime, the snow falling again. White snow, sparkling against the street lamps.

  Tess held on to the paperweight more tightly.

  It was so strange to be in a room where there weren’t any doors, at all.

  Still holding on to the paperweight in her right hand, as if by instinct, with her left hand, she pulled the cat’s eye marble from her pocket and held it up, too. Instantly, there were orange vectors of light beaming perfectly like straight lines at different angles from both the center of the paperweight and the interior of the marble, pointing directly towards the wall.